“The tub helps me relax, and it’s a great place to read.”

I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.

Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.

There are no easy choices. Easy choices are long gone.

I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.

We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.

The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending.

When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.

There are many, many books I’ve read and I think this is quite naïve actually because we all just try to uncover something.

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.

And I even like my own company. But when I’m alone, it’s to read or write. I’m in my thoughts. Mostly I’m learning.

When all else fails, read the instructions.

Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.

While the past was a book he had read and re-read may times, the future was just one more literary work of art into which he used to pour himself with deep thought and concentration.

Innumerable people since his death have told me how he used to read in the future, and this certainly was one of his very great strengths.